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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Marketing Translations

Shoppers are bombarded with messages of sales, specials, and deals. These marketing messages almost always make the deal sound better than it really is. Here are a few common messages along with translations into more neutral language.

Buy one and get the second one at50% OFF!

Translation: “25% off, but you have to buy two of them.”

We’ll pay the HST!

Translation: “11.5% off.” The HST may be 13%, but taking it off saves only 11.5%.

Fill all 10 spots on your sub card and you get aFREE SUB!

Translation: “9% off, but you have to buy 11 subs before this promotion ends.”

Buy with our card and collect valuable points!

Translation: “Trade dollars for another form of currency called points whose value we control and can devalue with redemption rule changes any time we please.”

None of these deals is necessarily good or bad. They just aren’t as good as they seem at first. Do readers have any more good examples?

7 comments:

I think Preet wrote about the bigger volume, better value gimmick in the Globe today. Shoppers perceive a better value when they get more for the same price rather than getting a smaller quantity that costs less per unit.

@Echo: It's true that half off is better than half more, but people seem to prefer getting more.

@AnatoliN: That's a good list. On the first point, I've been told that the cost of "Do not pay until ..." is actually borne by those who fail to pay on time and are charged very high interest retroactively.

@Anonymous: The full price without a discount would have been $113. The savings is $13 or 13/113 = 11.5%. Another way to think of it is that if the item had been discounted to $88.50 (by 11.5%), when you add the HST on, you get about $100.